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Category Archive: Commentary

So, if you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw me flip my shit earlier today about Deadly Skies, a 2006 sci fi disaster movie about an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Literally the only thing separating it from every other movie of its type is the fact that the main characters are a black woman and and a gay man.

It’s not super well-made, with some juvenile editing choices at times — and some shots that are framed the way a lot of my classmates in college would have framed them. The dialogue is often very bad. The first act moves too slowly; the third act, a little too fast.

But it’s comfortable. It takes the tropes of the genre and points directly at me and people like me, saying, “THESE ARE FOR YOU TOO.”

First of all, I’ve put up a new post on Patreon, so if you’re interested in paying me for all this nonsense, you can go do that and then read it. In it, I talk a little bit about Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core and how excited I am about the analysis of it that I’m doing. It’s gay, guys. It’s so gay.

Also, #ComicsGate is still a thing, I guess. Because some people still think that comics were better when they were all about white dudes fighting the most uncontroversial supervillains, forever, and ever, and ever. Despite the fact that this prelapsarian, apolitical version of comics never existed anywhere except in their own heads.

Or, the insufficiency of binary feminist criticism in mutant discourse.

Richard Siken wrote the line history is a little man in a brown suit/trying to define a room he is outside of. A lot of the time, that’s how I feel about gender.

Growing up assigned-female, I was drawn to the idea of being ‘not like other girls.’ I spent most of my time with boys, but reveled in not being one of them. I tested out binding and packing for years before my best friend bought me my first binder. I talked to trans men about drag, about whether it was okay for someone like me — then thinking I was a girl — to participate.

When I started wandering around the queerer parts of the internet — you know, the places where kids try out new names and pronouns and try to explain themselves with a language none of us were ever taught and half of us only halfway understand. Tumblr’s a big part of that, especially for me. While I still thought I was cis, someone said, anonymously, that they’d thought I was nonbinary.

For some reason — wink, nudge — that mattered to me. So I started to consider things. What did I do with the characters I liked? I made them trans. Usually, I made them nonbinary.

And I looked back, too, on the single most consequential figure in my queer youth: Mystique, as played by Rebecca Romijn. Mystique in her nakedness, her refusal to conform. Cis feminists, I’ve since learned, see her as a concession to the male gaze, using the subtly insidious “empowered naked lady” trope. It’s the trope people associate with any character with breasts who maybe, sometimes, shows them.